Free Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do by Gerald Gross

conventions…………………………. 30
Business trips to London, Milan, Paris, and the Coast ……….. 30
Preparation for, attendance at, and recovery from two semiannual sales conferences …………………………………. 30
Illness …………………………………………… 10
Personal emergencies ……………………………….. 5
Funerals …………………………………………. 3
Total days out of office annually ………………………. 307
     
Leaving:
     
Total days actually at office…………………………… 58
     
    We have demonstrated that editors actually spend only 58 days out of any given year (except leap year) working in their offices. But—do they really
work
there? A second survey, this one a poll of 460 former editors-in-chief of major publishing companies, taken at the Midtown branch of the New York State Unemployment Office, revealed something that most authors have always suspected but never until now had confirmed:
    H OW E DITORS S PEND T HEIR T IME P ER D AY
Total number of hours in working day (9 A.M . to 5 P.M .) …….. 8.00
     
From which are subtracted:
     
Time trapped in traffic ……………………………… 0.15
Lunch (including travel time) …………………………. 2.15
Editorial board meetings, publication board meetings, staff and other meetings ………………………………….. 2.00
Just going into a meeting ……………………………. 0.05
Just getting off a call ……………………………….. 0.10
Just running out the door ……………………………. 0.10
Just down the hall …………………………………. 0.15
Coffee breaks …………………………………….. 0.20
Personal phone calls ……………………………….. 0.25
Industry gossip ……………………………………. 0.20
Keeping up with the industry (reading
Publishers Weekly, Variety, New York Times, Newsweek, Playboy)
…………………. 0.15
Taking things up with the powers that be ………………… 0.10
Noodling with the figures ……………………………. 0.05
Seeing what the sub rights people say …………………… 0.05
Checking with legal ………………………………… 0.05
Running down one last figure from production ……………. 0.05
Locating the check ………………………………… 0.15
Locating the manuscript …………………………….. 0.15
Typing up, photocopying, and mailing résumés to other publishers. 0.30
Total hours occupied in not editing anything ……………… 8.00
     
Leaving:
     
Total hours devoted to advancing the cause of literature …….. 0.00
     

Lunch with a Favorite Agent
     
    John F. Thornton
     
    In his last full year as a trade book acquisition editor, J OHN T HORNTON purchased breakfast, lunch, drinks, and dinner for, by his count, 107 literary agents. It is all the more lamentable that, within a year of his departure for the Book-of-the-Month Club, where he is now editorial director, the publishing division that employed him was dismantled, Lego fashion, and redistributed. His fond hope is that the many best-seller proposals he was promised will eventually come into his purview as finished books to purchase for his club members
.
----
    April Fool’s jest or not, Mr. Thornton, then associate publisher for Facts on File, rose to the defense of his editorial colleagues, put
his
own tongue firmly in
his
own cheek, and sent off to the “Letters” column of
Publishers Weekly
the following satiric parry to Mr. Curtis’s satiric thrust
.
Lunch with a Favorite Agent
     
    “An outrage, nothing less,” is what my favorite agent, G. Gordon Bidding, called Richard Curtis’s April Fool’s Day attack on editors (“News of the Week,” Mar. 30). “Relations are tense enough these days without having to throw a sucker punch like that, don’t you think?” he asked in a tone of genuine concern.
    “Hardly,” I said.